Finding Our Way in the Modern World

By

Evgeny Morozov

Updated Aug. 24, 2012 4:31 p.m. ET

Long before bossy GPS technology invaded our cars, chiding us for wrong turns with a patronizing "Recalculating . . . ," cultural critics were already complaining about the debilitating effect of navigation technologies—even the paper-based and analogue variety. Some, like the Marxist philosopher Herbert Marcuse, saw road maps as the embodiment of the anti-humane and unthinking rationality of the modern condition. "A man who travels by automobile to a distant place chooses his route from the highway maps. . . . Others have done the thinking for him," he complained in 1941. Others thought that maps, signs and highway codes impoverish our sense of space, with the French theorist Henri Lefebvre lamenting that the driver "perceives only his route, which has been materialized, mechanized and technicized, and he sees it from one angle only—that of its functionality."

Marcuse all but gave up, despairing that "there is no personal escape from the apparatus which has mechanized and standardized the world." But Tristan Gooley, who, according to his website, is "the only living person to have both flown solo and sailed singlehanded across the Atlantic," has no use for such defeatism; as the title of his deeply poetic book—"The Natural Navigator"—suggests, there is life after the compass, maps and even GPS. Or, to put it more accurately, there was life before them, and that way of life—in which we orient ourselves by examining the types of clouds in the sky above us or the strength of sea currents beneath our feet or the marks that winds leave in the snow—is worth studying and defending.

The Natural Navigator

By Tristan Gooley The Experiment, 307 pages, $14.95

ENLARGE

Gaetan Charbonneau

Mr. Gooley provides ample instructions, complete with diagrams of wind patterns and tide heights, for living and traveling like a natural navigator. Even the tiniest of details—branches grow more horizontally on a tree's sunnier side, for example, so in the Northern Hemisphere the fuller foliage points south—can offer useful navigational cues. But why, some may ask, should we bother interpreting the shapes of trees and rocks when our iPhone can tell us in seconds where we are and where we need to be? For Mr. Gooley, there is a subtle but fundamental difference between finding direction—the raison d'être of what he calls "survival navigation"—and ambiently knowing direction, which is what "natural navigation" aspires to teach. To "know" direction, Mr. Gooley argues, striking many of Lefebvre's themes, is also to understand the world we move though and to seek a more enriched experience of being in it; hence, for him, "it is more important to understand why the methods work than to be able to use them."

Natural navigation, thus, is more like live opera or theater; even in the age of ubiquitous and always-on access to streaming services like Spotify or Netflix, opera and theater still have their uses, pleasures and aesthetics. "Natural navigation can be as much a mental journey as a physical one, and it is this that makes it a profound art," he writes. Casting natural navigation as art is a wise rhetorical move, for any arguments for its practical advantages would be futile (well, except in those cases where GPS directs too-trusting drivers off a cliff or into a river). As art, though, natural navigation faces as little competition from computers as poetry: Few doubt that computer algorithms can churn out great rhymes—perhaps far more efficiently than most slacker poets—but we are not likely to see an Apple Mac Pro inaugurated as our poet laureate any time soon.

To his credit, Mr. Gooley is not anti-technology. In fact, he even argues that new instruments, like GPS units and smartphones, can help us notice previously unknown navigational cues offered by nature. And though he has very little to say about navigating urban space, here, too, technology can offer unexpected assistance—for example, in "helping" us get lost. Consider GetLostBot, a new Web service that studies your "check-ins" on sites like Foursquare. Upon noticing that you tend to visit the same places all over again, GetLostBot intervenes by urging you to go explore some unfamiliar venue. The trick is that, while GetLostBot sends you directions to the place, it never actually tells where it is you are going; this is supposed to be a surprise. It won't be too difficult to recast those straightforward walking directions in the natural-navigation tips that Mr. Gooley prefers.

Early in "The Natural Navigator," Mr. Gooley writes of the immense disconnect between the romantic excitement about navigation he felt as a child and the boring, highly technical literature—stripped of any appreciation of the environment that is being navigated—that he came to read as an adult. Sounding like a latter-day Herbert Marcuse, he discovers himself in "a world of screens and bureaucracy, of checklists and never-ending acronyms" and notes that, while "it was clear that this was a world I needed to understand," it was "not one in which I wanted to live."

Sadly, Mr. Gooley's complaints ring true. "The Science of Navigation: From Dead Reckoning to GPS," by science writer Mark Denny, treats its subject as if it were a treatise on something as mundane as doornails. The lyrical quibbles of romantics like Mr. Gooley, who argue that navigation can and should be an art, are dismissed in a single sentence—"navigation can be defined as the science (perhaps initially an art) of maneuvering safely and efficiently from one part of the world to another"—before the author proceeds to bombard the reader with technical details of navigation instruments and their history.

The Science of Navigation

By Mark Denny Johns Hopkins, 261 pages, $30

All of this is reported in such leaden prose, with Mr. Denny constantly informing the reader of what exactly he is trying to do—"to set the table, I begin with some basic facts about our planet"—that one begins to understand the pains Mr. Gooley felt when reading such texts. "The Science of Navigation" has some interesting riffs—such as Mr. Denny's account of the Great Trigonometric Survey, a 19th-century British effort to map the Indian territory—but the author's unshakable certainty about everything ("in the future we will continue to use GPS to determine our location") and his reluctance to grant that, perhaps, there is more to navigation than just finding the most efficient way of getting from point A to point B, mar his project.

Recasting navigation as a science might have its pragmatic benefits, but, as Mr. Gooley reminds us, it would probably make us miss subtle cues like the great "bird poo compass." Formed by the sun, tree and birds, it will "likely go unnoticed by all who do not take an interest in the strange art that is natural navigation." Now, does your iPhone have an app for that?

—Mr. Morozov is the author of "The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom."

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